13.8: Drafting the Research Paper

When you have a basic structure for your paper, you can begin drafting individual paragraphs. As you are developing your draft, you should keep in mind a few of the categories typically used to assess whether or not a paper has been successful. These include development, organization and focus, and mechanics.

Development

When an instructor assesses your paper’s development, they are typically looking to see that you have fully explained each of your main ideas and supported all claims with specific, cited evidence. If you make a claim and do little to support it, or if you throw out terms that you do not define or deal with in a deep enough way for readers to understand them, you will generally see this lack reflected in the development category of the paper rubric.

Keep in mind that each paragraph essentially functions as its own miniature essay, with each topic sentence serving as a sort of mini-thesis statement that you support with a mix of evidence and analysis. Each paragraph should work to support your overall thesis in some clear way, and your transitions should not only move readers to the next idea, but also help them to understand how various ideas relate to one another as the paper progresses. A college-level paragraph typically contains a minimum of 7-10 sentences, and this is not an arbitrary metric: a college-level paragraph has to do some real heavy lifting—you need to make your claim, support or challenge that claim with evidence from sources that you introduce and briefly summarize, offer analysis of how the evidence relates to your claim, and provide closure to one idea while transitioning into another. This is why a paragraph consisting of only 3-5 sentences is generally considered far too short for the kind of papers you will be writing as a college student. Similarly, because you are working with more complex ideas in college, you will likely need at least 2-3 paragraphs to fully develop each of your main ideas; papers that rely on the traditional “five-paragraph” model often come up short because this model simply doesn’t give you enough space to explore ideas in a nuanced way.

Organization and Focus

In a well-organized draft, all elements of the paper come together to make a cohesive point. In an informative paper, this means that by the end of the paper, all of your points have helped your reader to understand the topic; in a persuasive paper, this means that the reader has a clear sense of your argument and the reasons behind it, and that you have made your case without relying on faulty logic or generalizations. In a focused essay, the author incorporates only the details that relate to the idea they are attempting to convey; while they know much more than they include in the paper, they are confident enough to leave out filler information that does not directly contribute to their explicit purpose.

Mechanics

In the early stages of drafting, you may worry less about fine-tuning, but you should still focus on the basics: clear, complete sentences, proper citation, and professional formatting. As you draft, you may find it helpful to take breaks to read over what you have written so far: taking your draft sentence by sentence will ensure that each idea comes through clearly and concisely. Later, during the revision process, you can focus on refining individual sentences and considering whether certain ideas would come through more strongly if combined or separated. Try to keep in mind that your paper will be read by someone, and think about creating a fluid, engaging reading experience for this audience.